WHO recommends easy-to-read health labels on food packaging

Packaged food and drinks should have easy-to-read nutritional information on the front of the products, according to the first-ever World Health Organization draft guidelines.

Packaged food and drinks should have easy-to-read nutritional information on the front of the products to help consumers make healthier choices, according to the first-ever World Health Organization draft guidelines that stopped short of recommending harsher warning labels.

Increased consumption of processed foods high in salt, sugar and fat is a key driver of a global obesity crisis, with more than a billion people living with the condition and an estimated eight million early deaths every year due to associated health problems like diabetes and heart disease, WHO data shows.

Yet governments have struggled to introduce policies to curb the epidemic. Currently, only 43 WHO member states have any kind of front-of-package labeling either mandatory or voluntary, the UN agency told Reuters, despite evidence showing labels can affect buying behavior.

The WHO began work on the draft guidelines, which have not been previously reported, in 2019. They aim “to support consumers in making healthier food-related decisions,” Katrin Engelhardt, a scientist in the Nutrition and Food Safety department of the WHO, told Reuters by email.

A public consultation on the guidelines closed on Oct. 11 and the finalized version will be released in early 2025.

The WHO’s guidance recommends governments implement “interpretive” labels that include nutritional information and some explanation of what that means about the healthiness of a product.

An example would be NutriScore, developed in France and used in a number of European countries, which ranks food from A (green, containing essential nutrients) to E (red, containing high levels of added salts, sugars, fats or calories).

Chile and several other countries in Latin America use a tougher system, with warnings that a food is “high in sugar,” salt or fat on the front of the package, in a black octagon that resembles a stop sign. Food labeling expert Lindsey Smith Taillie, co-director of the Global Food Research Program at the University of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, said the food industry has pushed back against warnings and favors “non-interpretive” labels, which include the nutrient information but no guide on how to understand what that means, such as those used in the United States.